Editorials, Essays and More: From spring 2010 to fall 2010, we will be featuring abstracts of the Graduate Student Prize Honorable Mentions from the fall 2009 conference. To see the complete winning essay, please check our "Graduate Student Prize" page...thank you!
Humanities Research & Multidisciplinary Collaboration
by Ashley R. Kelly and Allan MacDougall
In the current economic climate, scholars and students struggle to fund their research and defend their research funding. Many of these scholars have aligned themselves with other academic faculties, creating interdisciplinary research connections between engineering and science researchers and researchers in the humanities. The goal, on both sides, is to add a 'real world'—ergo, more acceptable—applicability to research. While this push towards inclusiveness has fostered innovative and insightful work, there is a danger that humanities scholars' work will be relegated to a variety of secondary roles. Canadian rhetoric scholar Judy Z. Segal states that "when we [humanities scholars] don't understand scientists, we feel stupid; when scientists don't understand us, they get angry". If humanities scholars are valued enough to be brought on to an interdisciplinary team, why do active interdisciplinary humanities researchers, like Segal, argue their work tends to be undervalued?
We posit that, in multidisciplinary work, the humanities scholar brings questions of context, situation, and ethics to technically-inclined domains—or, as one computer science researcher said, the "human point-of-view." This presents a risk—these questions can challenge the credibility, values, and assumptions of the research being undertaken. From gender to genre, humanities scholars apply a unique approach to the technological domain. This paper presents a case study situated in our own multi- and interdisciplinary work, providing a backdrop for what teachers of language and writing have known for years: crossing disciplinary boundaries is risky business.
A RISKY GAME: IDENTITY, LITERATURE AND THE RISK OF LOSING CONTROL IN PALE FIRE, BY VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Lígia Maria Winter
State University of Campinas, Brazil
This paper was supported by the National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development – CNPq – Brazil
ABSTRACT: This paper’s proposal is to think about two different, but complementary, kinds of risks: the risks modern rationality runs when it proscribes mimetic relations, such as the ones found in literature, in order to form a definite identity, and the risk Modern Literature becomes for this identity, inverting the proscribing process and allowing an identity loss that encourages a strange type of criminality. To think about these risks, the book Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov, was selected. In this book, a necessary loss of the self for the constitution of a poetic and autobiographic identity is in contrast with an also necessary betrayal that places back in scene the excluded elements of the self. The main risk taken by a coercive way of thinking, necessary for the constitution of a clear identity, is a devious return of excluded mimetic relations that put in doubt this thinking’s clearness. In the book, the poet John Shade is the one who runs this risk. The editor and narrator Charles Kinbote is the character responsible for bringing back into scene the mimetic relations that endanger the poet’s and his poem’s constructed identity. A controlling way of thinking runs the risk of losing control, that’s what happens in the poem’s composition. This paper’s main purpose, in this context, is to understand how rational thinking runs the risk of causing irrational consequences by proscribing mimetic relations and how literature embraces these consequences in a risky game that includes betrayal, murder and other kinds of criminality.
It’s All Fun and Virtual Games Until Someone Gets Their Eye Poked Out: Virtually Embodied Spaces, and the Inherent Risk of Instantiation by the Implicit Imperative of the Second-Person ‘You’
Brendan Stapley
University at Buffalo
Even as a piece of media technology opens a channel of communication, this channel creates a rift between the sender and receiver of data. This rift creates a space in which the technology can potentially impose subjugation upon the user, a subjugation which I argue is instantiated through the implicit use of a second-person narrative involving the user. In an interface with mediating technologies, the user risks subjection in a second-person role with the digital machine, and a loss of agency to the imperative couched within the ‘you’ utilized in a second-person address.
We begin by following the research of Rachel Prentice in her essay “The Anatomy of Surgical Simulation: The Mutual Articulation of Bodies in and Through the Machine”, as her concept of mutual articulation pertains directly to the effects of perceived materiality in virtual reality constructs. Prentice’s research focuses on surgical learning as may be realized through simulation in various virtual reality applications. Our interest directs us toward the corporeal consequence researchers have demonstrated surgical VR environments effect upon the practicing surgeon. Surgery is inherently embodied action, and so implicitly a surgeon must understand the patient body’s materiality. As described by Prentice, tacit knowledge acquired by the surgeon’s body, his physical skill set, may be articulated through the interface of man and machine; a computer facilitates visual and kinesthetic interaction between the surgeon and the virtual body of the patient. Various haptic feedback devices are employed at the interface level between man and machine to provide kinesthetic feedback for a user; these haptically enabled instruments provide the sensation of interacting with a material body, an illusion that enables an articulation of the user by the machine which is generating the virtual body. As one material body physically operates on a second, the second responds by sensorially informing the first. A two-way channel of sensory communication is opened between the two bodies. Consequent to this full-duplex data flow, both bodies reach new states of articulation. Prentice terms these reciprocally realized processes ‘mutual articulation’. Interesting to us is not how, but simply that a physical connection is established between the surgeon’s hands and the model body generated by the computer. This means a virtual simulation, something commonly perceived of as immaterial, may obtain to manifest as material in existence to the user. Prentice’s research convincingly implies that bodies can be created as body objects in a virtual reality simulator. Mutual articulation is possible to the extent and degree that the user’s body interprets the virtual body object as having material extension. The idea that a representation may manifest materially is a major theme in Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark, as per Adie’s, the protagonist’s, observation on page 37, of “how smart an image was – how much it embodied”, or as is implied by Spider Lim’s physical bruises, contracted by bumping into a limb in Adie’s virtual recreation of Rousseau’s The Dream.
Bodies seem bound within the sensations they receive, and these sensations are the mind’s only link with a world outside itself. We may argue that the body is the primary technical extension of the mind, that the body is our most natural technical object. In their essay “The Corporeal Body in VirtualReality”, Craig D. Murray and Judith Sixsmith frame the body in “terms of its sensorial architecture, or its structures of corporeality, [as] a useful way to understand how individuals come to know the boundaries of their bodies”. Within this position, any technological device that extends the sensation of the body effectively extends the boundary of the body. Body image becomes an unstable entity; the body is plastic. If this is true, a separation of real and cyber bodies is invalid, and the concept of mutual articulation as presented by Rachel Prentice is unproblematic, given that our technological ability to create believable simulation is adequately matched to the sensorial demands of the body.